


Balaenoptera levante

by Nemonus



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-28 00:15:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12593752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: The creature sailors prayed to, the red at night and red in the morning, sat in front of her looking faintly seasick. Billie Lurk teaches the Outsider how to sail.





	Balaenoptera levante

Billie Lurk expected the Outsider to have an affinity for the sea, so when he sat silent at the bow long after they passed the algae-stained buoys she began to worry. 

Little wonder if those worries were of the monsters and superstition kind. Wet tendrils could fall over the gunwales, mollusks could sprout shells black and cracking adhered to the sail, pulling it down with the weight of their oozes. No matter that it was a humid spring and out past the waves the water was calm and oily-flat. The creature sailors prayed to, the red at night and red in the morning, sat in front of her looking faintly seasick.

The world did not change around him. The air did not shudder, did not turn to gray glass. Instead, the Outsider reminded Billie of Emily after she had washed up on the Dreadful Wale, ragged and round-shouldered and angry. As with her, Billie had offered the leviathan what food she could scrounge, half-gone apples and cheese sweating in its skin.

Somehow, Billie Lurk had made it a habit of rescuing people. 

This one had proved a maladaptive rescue. Whether because of a sort of reality-shock or because he had for too long been used to speaking as the mouthpiece for the all-seeing Eye, the Outsider had not spoken much. He had eaten in her scrounged flat and trailed along behind her when she went to the docks to untie a boat abandoned for now by one of the wealthy and frightened aristocrats evacuated from around the Conservatory. The Abbey was not using this boat. Billie Lurk smirked to think about what the Abbey was, as a unit, doing right now. 

“What should we name the boat?” Billie said. “The Dreadful Wale was an anagram.” 

The Outsider did not turn to look at her. His disused voice was thin and many-toned like the oil on the water. 

“Farewell Void?” Billie pressed. 

“Except that you were _fond_ of Daud.” 

Yes. By the — y _es_ , she had been. When Daud had leaned over to whisper that coughing name in the Outsider’s ear she had already started to forget the actual tactile fact of him, of this surrogate father who had once held a sword to her throat. She had hated and loved him in such equal measure that the impressions had alchemetized together into an emotion that she figured might be called familial loyalty. 

“True,” she said. “It should be something I want to remember. And I don’t have …” She paused as she realized it. “…as much to hide now.” Emily Kaldwin was willing to be her benefactor — not that Billie would take the charity, but it was there like a purse. She didn’t have to worry about cut strings. The other people who might want to strike her down, namely the witches, were dead and scattered. The cultists were spooked by their own visions, since she had ghosted their captive right out under their haunted noses. It still felt strange to be able to see the Outsider in the real world, in his funeral/rebirth clothes. 

“So what do you think you’ll do next?” she asked. They were further out now, the wind going strong enough that she had to hardly do more than sit straight as she adjusted the sail with one hand and gripped the small tiller in the crook of her other arm. The splintered edges of the boat were brown and green with old wood and algae. 

“I want to speak to the empress,” he said. “I want to tell her … to rein in the whalers. They all know the pods are leaving. But she needs to find those people other work, to allow the sea to rest after its beating.”

“That’s the most optimistic thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“I wasn’t impartial. I just …” He cupped one pale hand over his eyes. “I just want her to say that she’ll do it.” 

He had been going to say something else. Maybe he had trouble talking without knowing the back and forth of time, without being able to conjure hearts of living things out of the smoky dark. Did he feel limited now, or revived? He had been going to talk about the thing with eyes worse than his.

“That black eye in the mine,” Billie said. “Even the rats hated it. What in the Void was that?” 

She paused. “It doesn’t feel right to curse that way any more. It’s too real.” 

Those shadow creatures made of knives had stalked below while she clung to the tapered chain of a candelabra. 

The Outsider hesitated before he spoke. “I don’t know. _By the Void._ ” He tried it out, a chuckle hovering on his mouth. “The Void doesn’t promise anything. It eats promises. But it also coexists with the genius and mercy of those who would defy it.”

He still spoke like an orator. Somehow, if he went to the most shadowed and web-ridden blackmarket house on the underbelly of Karnaca, he would still speak like this. The proprietor would doff their hat and feel honored. Billie began to feel twitchy. “What do you think it will do next?”

“It doesn’t have intentions in the way you or I do. I’m still trying to figure out what it is without me.” 

Or what he was without it. They sailed in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes, until they were far enough out that Billie feared they would lose track of the shore. She needed to do something else other than watch the horizon and feel for the wind. “Do you want to sail?”

“I don't think I know how.” 

“Sit here.” 

He did not have his sea legs, and clambered crabwise. Luckily he did not have far to go. She showed him the tiller and the lines. She had already told him to watch his head around the boom. He was a quiet, serious, attentive student who sat so still that it alarmed her. He moved like a clockwork soldier shorn of weapons, stilt-legged and uncertain of his own composition. When cold water splashed his legs and his hands he did not seem to mind, just wiped at it the black spots once or twice and returned to his position. Billie herself was beginning to get cold, to reconsider the idea of sailing without a destination. Her Void-given hand was weighted differently now, metal and leather instead of something that flickered out of the corner of her vision. Only the whitecaps flickered. 

Her crystal eye had become cloudy, more difficult to use to see wide landscapes. Gray fogs dotted it like tarnished silver. She could still read the sea, though, still knew that the evening would be calm and clear but too cold for comfort out here. A stolen boat and a stolen bed. She would like for more than the name of the Dreadful Wale to be hers, now. Things had changed and her safe house needed to be safer, but Billie Lurk also felt that she was in charge of the change in a way that she had never been even in the Wale. Oh, people would want to _torture_ her for the information about the person sitting in front of her. Oh, they would never know. She had ghosted her way through the mine, and … maybe Emily Kaldwin _was_ a good next step. 

The Outsider flinched. The tiller drifted as his hand sprung open. As soon as Billie took it back he shot her a look of apologetic fear, then ducked again as the boom swung. The tiller resisted slightly in Billie’s left hand, the shush of the water deepening as resistance increased and the boat turned. Still well in control, she followed the direction of the Outsider’s odd green gaze. 

A whale floated on the surface, its back as round as a river rock and the slight eddies of the water around its tentacles the only suggestion of the bulk underneath. 

“Steer clear of them in a boat this size,” Billie said, wrenching her thoughts back from the Void to her new student. 

“I will.”

“Do you … recognize them?” 

The Outsider paused. “They don’t deserve what was done to them. But nor do the people who live here have total cause to believe they are innocent. The whales are kin to other things."

“What things?” Billie looked down at the spots of black water on the side of the boat. 

“In the Void, I was afraid all the time. You saw the Eye.”

“I couldn’t help but see it.”

“It looked into me all the time, inverted and inward-seeing, doubled back in on itself. The fear was the worst because …I had the sense that it came from me, from a different me.” He pressed against his sternum with a closed fist. “This me. The fear was the only thing from this world that could go there, but still I hated it. Or, not the only thing. It and the whales.” 

The Outsider looked at her. His own new eyes looked too wide for his face, making his age even more difficult to determine than it had been in the other world. “I don’t think you need to name this boat, Billie Lurk.”

"I think you're right. I'll see about taking you to the empress." Both Billie and the ancient boy would have debts to work out with her.

Billie turned smoothly back toward the shore, the heavy canvas tugging on the lines. They would sail back and go to her apartment, would eat and drink like mortal people without prices on their heads. Maybe both of them were priceless now, to the Abbey and to the Void that would slowly reorganize itself around its thousand-years-pearl. Maybe she was free of the relentless taxonomizing of names for a while. Maybe both she and the Outsider would find new ones.

**Author's Note:**

> This and the fic that might or might not come after it are reactions to Death of the Outsider, and specifically about trying to figure out how to write Our Whale Boy in a way that keeps him a bit eerie while acknowledging that the game decided to make him human. Onward and upward ...


End file.
